BEGGARS IN SPAIN

From the author of the splendid Brain Rose (1989), another telling near/medium-future sociological probe. This time: What if people no longer needed to sleep? Leisha Camden belongs to a new generation of genetically enhanced children: she's tall, slim, intelligent, beautiful--and she doesn't sleep. So, growing up, Leisha and her fellow-Sleepless rapidly outshine their Sleeper contemporaries. But later, after global economic changes, most Americans subsist mindlessly on the public dole while resenting the success of the Sleepless-- especially when it emerges that the Sleepless are also immortal. So the Sleepless, led by the paranoid elitist Jennifer Sharifi, establish Sanctuary, a secure enclave where their genetic research can continue unobserved. Lawyer Leisha, who holds to sharing-caring values within a pluralistic society, rejects Sanctuary, preferring to offer practical advancement to ambitious Sleepers and Sleepless alike. Eventually, the Sleepless move Sanctuary into an orbiting habitat, where, having bred a third generation of Sleepless with even more astonishing abilities, Sharifi orders the preparation of biological weapons for a showdown with Sleeper Earth. But those freakish new children, their talents amplified by the lucid dreams developed by one of Leisha's Sleepers, overthrow Sharifi and jubilantly reaffirm Leisha's egalitarian principles. Though didactic (without being preachy) and uneven in places: thrilling drama, compelling dialectic.